The Physicist Of the Past

Four hundred years after a night that, strictly speaking, never happened, a monument stands on a ridge above a river that has changed its course three times since anyone first thought to name it. It shows a man crouched beside a broken cart-wheel, one hand extended toward a stranger's tool. Pilgrims climb the ridge for it. Scholars argue over what the inscription really means. Children are told the story before they are old enough to doubt it: that a stranger fell out of the sky beneath the wrong stars, and instead of taking a kingdom, he built one - slowly, honestly, one shared thing at a time.
None of it happened. Or all of it did, in the only way that mattered, in the space of a single exhausted night in a university basement, to a man who would wake at dawn remembering seventy years he had never lived. This is the story he lived through before he opened his eyes. It begins, as these things often do, with a flash of light no one was ready for.